According to Opera Software ASA in 1997 around 85% of the time spent at a computer was spent using desktop applications. In 2007, about 70% of the time was spent using a web browser. The web browser has become the most commonly used human interface for using computing.
However, the ways people are using Internet services and the ways the internet services are provided in terms of underlying technology are changing. The three strong trends that demonstrate this ongoing change are Rich Internet Applications, Cloud Computing, and Mobile Internet Services.
Rich Internet Applications
As the browser is used for the majority of the time spent at a computer, users demand rich functionality of complex software to be available through the web browser. Examples of the functionalities include image editing, video processing, document processing, VoIP telecommunications, video conferencing, and distributed collaboration systems. Exisitng technologies (Adobe Flex, AJAX, Java Applets) enable the browser to run complex applications. Although such applications were developed for the web browser by a number of startup and large companies, the architecture and legacy of the web browser place several limitations on application performance, development ease and the user interface richness.
Cloud Computing
Companies in the cloud computing field are building infrastructure for cloud computing. As computing and storage have gotten cheaper hosting internet applications with massive usage (millions of simultaneous users) within a centralized data center has become possible. Such applications and data centers have been built by companies like Google (search, email), Yahoo (email), Salesforce.com (CRM). The next step was to build a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) around these datacenters to allow third party developers to host their applications on the robust infrastructures built and supported by large industry players. This new way of developing, deploying, providing and using Internet services and applications was named “cloud computing.” Cloud computing was pioneered by companies such as Amazon with their Amazon Web Services initiative which started with S3 (APIs and service for cloud storage) and EC2 (computing). The followers included Google (Google Application Engine) and Microsoft (Live Mesh initiative).
Mobile Internet Services
With the introduction of convenient zoom-in/zoom-out multi-touch user interfaces on mobile devices with small screens, affordable pricing for unlimited Internet usage, fast data transfer capabilities on cellular networks (3G), built-in global positioning devices, photo and video cameras, powerful processors and large storage mobile devices are becoming the new and great platform for rich mobile Internet applications and services including cloud-based applications. No standard way of utilizing the computing and storage power of the cloud is available on mobile devices. The internet is accessed via custom web browsers built into mobile devices (Opera, iPhone) or third party applications that lack a standard approach for using internet services.
The web browser used to access cloud applications uses http and https-based protocols, placing a number of limitations on the capabilities of cloud computing. In particular the current cloud computing platforms fail to enable data synchronization between multiple application users, real-time streaming capabilities, and real-time collaboration capabilities. User interface is lacking to utilize capabilities provided by rich applications running in the cloud (cloud-based applications). Also, a browser cannot naturally offload data processing to the cloud (e.g. graphic rendering or CPU intensive jobs) and there is no way to make offloading transparent and seamless for the end user.
The web browser's underlying technological principles of operation and its architecture can no longer provide the best solution for certain crucial usage scenarios like—for example—sharing data, real-time collaboration around documents and media, working with applications executing in a distributed computing environment.
The web browser architecture places limitations on performance, user experience richness and ease of development of modern Internet applications.
The web browser architecture is not well-suited to work with cloud-based applications. In particular with those cloud-based applications including real-time communication functionality, data sharing and data synchronization among multiple users. The web browser does not address the need of emerging rich Internet applications and cloud-based Internet applications which include complex functionality on mobile device platforms
Beyond the browser, there are a few methods that are commonly used by users to share the documents and collaborate. However, most of these methods/applications are even less convenient then the browser.
Users utilize email as the way to share documents as attachments but email has limitations such as the attachment size and difficulty of tracking document versions. FTP for document sharing does not enable real-time communication and collaboration.
Tools exist that work with one or a few file types, but do not address the sharing and collaborating around many rich media types such as pictures, music, videos, games, or applications. Existing collaboration tools do not provide support for cloud-based Internet applications.
Based on the above there is a need for an improved base application for using Internet services with a different user interface and architecture better suited to answer the emerging needs such as the richness of Internet applications, support for and taking advantage of cloud computing applications and utilizing these two trends on the emerging mass market mobile device platforms.